I Hate Self-Help Advice, But This Mindset Shift On Feeling "Lazy" Changed Everything For Me

Now, I don’t like admitting how valuable I find self-help anecdotes, but I recently finished reading Lauren Southern’s memoir, “This Is Not Real Life,” and she had a line in there that made me giggle. Preceded by 244 pages of unrelenting suffering, she describes hitting a breaking point that gave way to the spiritual reset she knew she needed. It involved tossing aside hard drives of her chaotic past, doomscroll-proofing her social media “like a toddler’s iPad,” and yes, buying “the avocado toast of self-help books: Atomic Habits.” “Sue me,” she jokes, reluctantly admitting she needed James Clear to repeat “Make good habits easy and bad habits hard” a thousand different ways before it stuck, reading it every morning while spooning eggs into her mouth.

I recognize the irony-poisoned inclination to distance oneself from any earnest attempt at self-improvement, especially one as ubiquitous and milquetoast in reputation as to land in the hands of normies everywhere. However, this is probably the first trap you must overcome if you are seriously committed to changing your life. If you feel compelled to change it, something obviously isn’t right. And the instinct to meme about it to establish how “above it all” you are is probably a defense mechanism. 

Internalizing any advice or mental reframing first requires some level of vulnerability: admitting you lack something and being sincere enough not to flinch when the advice sounds obvious. To joke about how lame it is for you to be reading a self-help book suggests a combination of ego and shame (which is kind of what her book is all about: processing ego and shame). So here’s my full circle moment. I was scrolling the “doom” website (X) when Elon Musk retweeted a two-minute Scott Adams clip containing golden nuggets of wisdom. Wisdom! On the Everything app! Can you imagine that? The premise was disarmingly simple; the caption promised that a little mental reframe could cure you of your lazy disposition in under two minutes. 

So, here it is, straight from the horse’s (or Scott Adams’) mouth, “What if laziness is a habit of thinking about the cost of things or the effort instead of thinking about the payoff?” What if this is nothing but a habit (thinking about the effort instead of thinking about the outcome)? And what if you can reverse laziness by simply developing a habit of thinking more about the outcome? Adams uses a few analogies to illustrate his point, like thinking about the delicious food you would like to enjoy rather than how long it would take you to get up and get it, and childbirth. “Why is it that people have a second child?” More specifically, “Why does a woman who goes through this awful childbirth have a second child? Don’t they always say the same thing? ‘If I remembered how bad this was, I wouldn’t do it again.’”

It’s not thinking about the effort, Adams deduces, that’s actually vital to the survival of humanity. If we focused exclusively, or just with greater emphasis, on the pain of labor, the fatigue of child-rearing, the agonizing sleepless nights, then we wouldn’t do it, or wouldn’t do enough of it to continue propagating the species. But because people who want and have children focus on how awesome it would be to have a family and all the joy that encompasses, they’re able to go through the pain. They’ve already committed to the greater project, paying little mind to the process of getting there, much like a marathoner pays little mind to the unrelenting soreness building up in their legs.

What if laziness is a habit of thinking about the cost of things or the effort instead of thinking about the payoff?

Ambitious people, like Adams himself, might not be so fundamentally different from the lazy, he hypothesizes; they have a thinking habit which produces dopamine because they’re thinking about the positive outcome, and that dopamine is the thing that gets them up and moving. They’re thinking of things in terms of their benefits, not their cost. Positive thoughts produce dopamine, which produces actions. And this, Adams suggests, is why self-help works, because they all revolve around positive thinking.

But is laziness really a solvable loop? I wanted to find out, so I started intentionally reframing how I thought about tasks. Cleaning the entire house, a task I’d been putting off for far too long, became a vehicle for a fresh, clean start I so desperately coveted rather than the tedious hours-long slog of tidying up, getting up close and personal with gross accumulated grime. Holding the image of the finish line in my head, I was able to get small cleaning tasks done. It began with tidying up the study where I do my work. I wasn’t sure if I’d even clean the whole room in one day, so I just started with what I could. 

But once I got started, the image of a clean slate permeated my prefrontal cortex. Clean surroundings made me associate that fresh start with a clutterless mind from which I would generate new, brilliant ideas and tidy up loose ends, so I pushed through. The dopamine high I got from its completion carried over into my next task. Before I knew it, I was cleaning room to room, vacuuming the floors, churning out loads of laundry, and taking out the trash. I was being meticulous, too. I left no stone unturned. I even started scrubbing the insides of my purse (which had seen better days). My new thought model left me with endless energy and regenerative motivation. By the end of the day, I practically had a new living space. I felt reborn. 

But there are other domains harder for me to conquer because my propensity for negative thinking is second-nature. I don’t default to positive thoughts, especially when it comes to cognitive tasks like writing. The physical world has always been a comfort to me. Physicality is easy. It’s the cognitive domains where doubt seeps in, because ideas are abstract, up to interpretation. It’s not quite as cut-and-dry what makes a good book, so much as you can objectively verify that someone can squat a certain amount of weight.

I always want to be writing more, writing better, and that pressure often leaves me paralyzed by writer’s block or a spiral of perfectionistic tweaking that goes on for far too long. The end result is that I take far longer than is reasonable to produce something, and my preoccupation with making it good has diminishing returns, if not the opposite intended effect. It’s especially burdensome because I remember when it felt effortless. Easy. If I stayed up all night to finish an article, there was no friction. I just wrote. Straight from the head to the document.

Is laziness really a solvable loop? I wanted to find out, so I started intentionally reframing how I thought about tasks.

Now I have what I can only describe as an invisible audience inside my head waiting for me to slip up. And the worst part is the paranoia is fueled by an outsized sense of self-importance to reality. Because there literally is no audience. I’m not J.K. Rowling, just a girl who’s had a few viral articles and about 5k followers on X. This realization ends up making me feel even worse. How can you have the ego of a niche internet celebrity without even being one? 

Adams’ illustration made me realize all of this is just a thought loop I got stuck on. Perhaps writing used to feel so effortlessly generative because I wanted to see if I could get people to care. And I did. And that feeling was addictive. When people are talking about your work, heaping praise, even insulting you, at least it’s a reaction that signals that your work matters, in some abstract sense. It’s a confirmation of your provocation. But not every article is going to go viral. You won’t linearly accumulate more views every single time. I found it so easy because writing for me, at the time, was gamified.

At first, the high of imagining anyone caring about something I wrote was tantalizing enough to keep me going. Then I did get people to care, and that became a reward loop for me: I need to keep this audience or increase it. And there were so many things going on in the world that I was jumping at the bit to talk about. Over time, though, you can lose steam. Things happen in your personal life that distract you, the news becomes less novel, and your wellspring of ideas dwindles because, well, you’ve written about a lot of topics by now. 

Oh, and people lose interest in you, especially if you stop being visible. Then you can get stuck there. Like you’re writing for an audience of no one with a short supply of inspiration. But what if this entire time it’s because I’ve Pavlov’d myself into expecting nothing? I expect no reward, so I deign to do the task. Adams has yet another perfectly fitting analogy, most relevant to my predicament. 

Admitting that “intellectually, I know that writing a book ruins almost a year and a half of my life” because it puts a “wet blanket on all of your free time.” So why and how does he write books? “I have to forget about how hard it is and just think about how cool it is to have a book if it does well. I imagine it doing well and people talking about it, maybe having a difference. So, I think about all these positive things and then I can write it.” 

Great, so my thinking is broken, but that’s actually a relief to know. Adams has other habits and thinking hacks that, when stacked together, could make you truly formidable. When it comes to changing your mindset, obviously, we all want to think positively and avoid thinking negatively, but you can’t actually remove bad thoughts. When you tell yourself not to think of something, your mind naturally thinks about it. Just ask anyone with OCD. So, instead of stopping a negative thought, which is a futile exercise, Adams advises you to crowd it out with other thoughts, be busy, and keep your mind somewhere else. These thoughts take up the shelf space, so there’s less room for the negative until you kill it by atrophy. 

He speaks of another reframing tool: changing the way you think about things so that they effectively communicate something to you that inspires you to make a certain choice, regardless of whether that framing is literally true or not. For example, let’s say you want to spend less time on social media. Adams suggests you stop thinking of social media as entertainment and instead think of it as a vampire that exists to suck the energy and attention out of you for somebody else’s financial benefit. 

“A reframe doesn’t have to be technically true,” he argues, just true enough that your brain is willing to deal with that thought until it sort of becomes true and you start thinking, "I don’t want to have a vampire sucking my energy. I think I’ll do something else." In my case, it would be using screen time in general to procrastinate, so I’ve started to appropriate this vampire analogy as sucking all of the productivity out of my day and progress out of my soul. 

Which brings me to his other big idea: systems over goals. Adams argues that goals are inferior to systems because goals are lofty ambitions that may or may not happen. It doesn’t really tell you how to get there. And Clear, in Atomic Habits (which credits Adams’ work in the Systems vs Goals section), points out that winners and losers have the same goals, so goal-setting suffers from a serious case of survivorship bias. We forget about all the other people who ran the race, who didn’t win. All the other applicants who didn’t get the job. 

They had the same goal, but didn’t achieve it, so it can’t be the goal itself that differentiates the winners from the losers. That’s the first design flaw. Then there’s the issue of fulfillment and incentives. Let’s say you achieve your goal. Then what? It’s something you’ve looked forward to, perhaps for a long time. Perhaps your entire life. And here it is. But then you’ll have to ask yourself, “Now what?” Your source of purpose and direction just slipped through your fingers, which is why goals are not a reliable source of happiness. 

You either never achieve your goal, or you do, and you’re immediately bored. Adams says when you achieve your goals, one of two things can happen: you feel empty and useless, perhaps even enjoying the spoils of your success until they bore you, or you set new goals. The problem with this, Adams argues, is that it enters you into a cycle of “permanent presuccess failure” or, if you never even achieve your goals, just permanent failure, which is hardly good for morale.

Systems, by contrast, are things you can do on a regular basis that increase your odds of happiness in the long run. Losing a certain amount of weight is a goal, but dieting is a system. Running a race under a certain time is a goal, but your training is your system. Both Clear and Adams list a host of problems with being overly goal-oriented when it comes at the expense of systems. When you focus solely on the goals, you aren’t putting your focus where it ought to be, and once you achieve your goals, your systems start to slip. “When you solve problems at the results level, you only solve them temporarily. In order to improve for good, you need to solve problems at the systems level. Fix the inputs and the outputs will fix themselves.” 

This joy of the process and the fulfillment it brings you is where you can find sustainable happiness now, not in some hypothetical future, and having an intelligent system makes you all the more likely to be successful in the long term and achieve your goals. Per Adams, “The goals people are fighting the feeling of discouragement at each turn. The systems people are feeling good every time they apply their system. That’s a big difference in terms of maintaining your personal energy in the right direction.” So imagine your goal is to run a three-hour marathon, but you don’t have a system in place, or you do, but you only implement it when it’s race season. 

Systems are things you can do on a regular basis that increase your odds of happiness in the long run.

Goal-oriented people like this need something like a race to provide them with temporary spurts of motivation and willpower, whereas the systems-oriented people have developed a well-oiled machine that is self-sustaining. They know that if they follow the system, they’re all the more likely to get their desired outcome, and the process itself is a rewarding feedback loop that provides immediate gratification from putting in the work. It isn’t ineffable, unreachable, or abstract. It’s their easy runs, their cross training, their Fartlek runs, their hill sprints, their strength training. Each part of the process has a role. Knowing this makes it all the more rewarding and motivating to do it. 

This could be why some people lose weight effortlessly while others are stuck in a war with their own willpower. Seasoned dieters know they need a system: I eat at this time, I avoid these foods, I eat this many calories, and after this many weeks, I will lose this many pounds. What makes the process all the more enjoyable and rewarding is Adams’ advice to remember why you’re doing this: what you hope to get out of it, not what it’s costing you: nights out at the bars, decadent donuts, caloric but delicious seasonal Starbucks lattes.

For someone like me stuck in a perfectionism-induced writer’s block, this reframe has helped me immensely. If I stop chasing the big goal, “write something important,” and instead keep the system oiled, even through micro-tasks like “open a Google doc every morning and spill 300 words” or sometimes, even just “open the document and look at it,” I win daily. The system itself becomes the source of satisfaction. That’s an incredibly useful thing to realize, because while putting things off or feeling stuck can make you feel lazy, it can actually be the exact opposite. It can be that you have so much to say or care so much about doing it the right way that the friction prevents you from moving. 

It is crucial, however, that you keep moving, even if just a little bit. Adams provides the white pill when he says this is nothing but a habit of focusing on the cost instead of the payoff. And while goals can be motivating in the short term, they can contain booby traps that keep you stuck in pre-success failure. Systems set you free. You can succeed today, not in some hypothetical future. The more often you run the system, the less it feels like effort; it just becomes second nature. 

If your thought patterns are just as unproductive as mine are, consider trying to reverse engineer them over the next month. Catch when you’re committing the cost-focus faux pas. Notice it, maybe even write it down, and invert it. What do you gain from doing this? What is it you want to happen at the end? Adams is a big proponent of affirmations. Specifically, writing down something you want to happen 15 times a day, so that your brain becomes accustomed to searching for opportunities—for luck—wherever they might appear, making your dreams more likely to come true, as you slowly reprogram yourself to search for luck.